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The national controversy that clouded the run-up to a Final Four that concluded Monday night in Indianapolis wasn’t the first collision between basketball and civil-rights politics.

In Louisiana in 1956, as in Indiana 59 years later, a four-team basketball tournament involving a favored Kentucky team was engulfed in a political storm, though the divisive issue then was race and not sexual preference.

And as in Indiana, where a recent religious-freedom law was widely seen as discriminatory against homosexuals, the Louisiana dispute involved changing cultural mores, a conservative legislature, worried civic and business leaders and, ultimately, government intervention that saved the event.

The turmoil surrounding the 1956 Sugar Bowl, a Christmas basketball tournament run by the organizers of the better-known New Year’s football game, had been triggered two years earlier by the Supreme Court’s historic ruling outlawing segregation.

In the tumultuous southern reaction to Brown V. Board of Education, many cities and states responded by transforming long-standing Jim Crow customs into hardened law.

Louisiana’s legislature passed a flurry of such bills in 1956. One, Act 579, widely known as the Athletic Events Bill, outlawed all public interaction between blacks and whites.

“All persons, firms, and corporations,” it read, “are prohibited from sponsoring, arranging, participating in, or permitting on premises under their control any dancing, social functions, entertainments, athletic training, games, sports or contests, and other such activities involving personal and social contacts, in which the participants or contestants are members of the white and negro races.”

Powerful interests in New Orleans immediately foresaw financial consequences, though the only civic entity initially willing to speak out in opposition was the Mid-Winter Sports Association (MWSA), organizers of the popular football and basketball Sugar Bowls.

That group prodded Governor Earl Long to veto the legislation. But the son of populist politician Huey Long refused.

“My mail,” he told reporters, “is running four-to-one in favor of the legislation.”

Next, Sugar Bowl organizers sought to water down the bill, proposing an exemption for New Orleans. When lawmakers rejected that, the group devised a failed plan that essentially would have created tiny integrated islands within an otherwise segregated arena and stadium.

Racial restrictions in college sports were loosening slowly in the 1950s, but not in the South. The region’s three largest conferences — the Atlantic Coast, Southeastern and Southwest — remained segregated and would be for another decade.

The 1956 Sugar Bowl field was comprised of three Catholic schools — Dayton, St. Louis, and Notre Dame — and the most dominant team in college basketball, Adolph Rupp’s Kentucky.

When action to invalidate or weaken the Louisiana law failed, Notre Dame and St. Louis, each of whom had black players, withdrew. Dayton, though it had no blacks at the time, did the same.

“If we went to the tournament as it now stands,” said Dayton athletic director Harry Baujan, “we’d be condoning the law.”

Kentucky Governor Happy Chandler, assuming the event would be canceled, hastily made plans for a new Christmas tournament in Louisville, the Blue Grass Classic, that would feature the Wildcats.

Rupp’s Kentucky team was all-white. He wouldn’t add his first black player, Tom Payne, until the 1970-71 season, well after most SEC teams had integrated.

Some Kentucky alumni saw the Sugar Bowl controversy as a chance for the border-state school with national ambitions to make a positive statement on race. They urged UK to join the other schools in withdrawing.

“Here is a situation where the University of Kentucky could courageously show that principle is more important to it than the ‘sugar’ in the Sugar Bowl,” Herschel Weil, a 1922 grad, wrote to UK president Frank Dickey.

But as Rupp himself had done so often when questioned about racial issues, Dickey used contractual obligations as an excuse. The school had promised the organizers it would appear, Dickey said, and it intended to honor that commitment.

“I agree with you that the problem of the religious and moral implications in this situation is a difficult one,” wrote Dickey in response to Weil. “However [I] feel that the moral values of integrity and honesty are also involved.”

Rupp’s influence on the decision can’t be determined but he and Kentucky helped round up three southern schools — Houston, Virginia Tech, and Alabama — as replacements and the 1956 Sugar Bowl, which the Wildcats won easily, went on.

Asked for his reaction to Act 579’s impact on what had been one of the nation’s premier holiday tournaments, MWSA president Paul DeBlanc said: “That’s the law and we will try to live under it.”

Three years later, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that law unconstitutional.

But the Sugar Bowl, perhaps a little gun-shy given its 1956 experience, would not include another northern team until Xavier of Ohio in 1962.

With a deranged narcissist in the Oval Office and his lackey controlling the Department of Justice, there is no point in looking to the federal government to curb police violence. Instead, President Donald J. Trump will do everything in his power to encourage it. In the wake of protests over the murder of George Floyd, he has demanded that governors crack down on protestors: "You have to dominate. ... If you don't dominate, you're wasting your time," he told them.

Moreover, most local police authorities are under local control -- mayors, city councils, district attorneys, police chiefs, sheriffs. That's where the accountability for police misconduct begins.

<p>But Congress could take a significant step toward reining in that misconduct by passing a bill to end the practice of allowing the Pentagon to give surplus war equipment to local police departments. There is simply no good reason for police in any city -- from Washington to Wichita -- to roll down the streets in armored personnel carriers, armed with battering rams and grenade launchers. They are not going to war. American citizens are not enemy combatants.</p><p>Several Democrats have already announced their intention to introduce legislation to end the practice. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, has said he would introduce such a measure as an amendment to the all-important annual defense policy bill -- which would give it a decent shot at passing since Republicans are deeply invested in the defense bill.</p><script async="" src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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</script><p>After protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer, local law enforcement authorities took to the streets in armored carriers, further inflaming tensions. They showed little inclination toward restraint or de-escalation. The same thing is occurring in cities around the country right now.</p><p>Off-loading surplus military hardware to local police departments was never a good idea. The practice started back during the 1990s as violent crime peaked and local and federal authorities were feverishly devoted to winning the so-called war on drugs. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the program ramped up, doling out battlefield gear even to small towns no self-respecting terrorist ever heard of.</p><p>Law enforcement agents became enamored of images of themselves decked out like soldiers on special-ops missions. According to <em>The New York Times</em>, the website of a South Carolina sheriff's department featured its SWAT team "dressed in black with guns drawn, flanking an armored vehicle that looks like a tank and has a mounted .50-caliber gun."</p><p>Poor neighborhoods are subjected to the military-style hardware much more often than affluent ones. And the consequence of that sort of policing is often less safety, not more. When the police behave like an occupying force, the residents return the favor -- treating them with suspicion and contempt. That hardly makes it more likely that police will get the information they need to solve crimes.</p><p>The administration of President Barack Obama understood that and curbed the Pentagon program after Ferguson. In the final years of the Obama administration, the Pentagon reported that local law enforcement agencies had returned 126 tracked armored vehicles, 138 grenade launchers and 1,623 bayonets, the Times said. Pause for a moment just to consider that. Why would any police department -- even New York City's army of 36,000 officers -- need bayonets and grenade launchers? Once you implant in the heads of police officers the notion that they need battlefield gear, their use of violence against unarmed citizens escalates as a natural consequence.</p><script async="" src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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</script><p>But guess what happened when Trump took office? He removed Obama's restraints on the Pentagon program, once again allowing local law enforcement agents to go to battle against the citizens they are sworn to protect. No surprise there. In 2017, Trump gave a speech in which he urged police officers not to worry about injuring a suspect during an arrest.</p><p>Police violence against black people is a problem as old as the nation itself. It didn't start with Trump's presidency and won't end when it's over. Rather, the racist culture that is embedded among so many law enforcement agencies showed itself clearly when major police unions enthusiastically backed Trump's election. When Trump is finally gone, the campaign to eradicate that culture can begin in earnest.</p>